The Covert War Against Rock: What You Don't Know About the Deaths of Jim Morrison, Tupac Shakur, Michael Hutchence, Brian Jones, by Constantine Alex

Author:Constantine, Alex [Constantine, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781936239504
Publisher: Feral House
Published: 2000-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

She was not buried by CHAOS, but she lived under its intolerant eye and it could silence her: “An American,” the New York Times reported on February 21, 1967, “identifying himself as Harold Cooper, a CIA man, had ordered the Japanese interpreter, Ichiro Takasaki, to substitute an innocuous translation in Japanese for Miss Baez’ remarks in English on Vietnam and Nagasaki’s atom bomb survivors.” Cooper asked Takasaki to revise political statements made by the folk singer, and warned, “If you don’t cooperate, you will have trouble in your work in the future.” The interpreter cooperated and mistranslated her statements.

“It was a most strange case,” Takasaki told reporters. “I knew that Miss Baez was a marked person who was opposed to the Vietnam War and who had been tacitly boycotted by the broadcasting companies in the United States. American friends also repeatedly advised me not to take on the job, but I took it on as a business proposition, since the Japanese fans were coming not to hear her political statements, but her music. I met Mr. Cooper once in the presence of a Times reporter in Japan, but even in that meeting he openly demanded that I mistranslate. I tried to reject the absurd demands, but he knew the name of my child and the contents of my work very well. I became afraid and agreed.”7

A year later the European Exchange System announced that the sale of Joan Baez records had been banned from all Army PXs. And in 1969, Baez denounced the draft on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. She was censored by CBS—her comments cut from the video tape when the program aired. Shortly thereafter, CBS canceled the troublesome Smothers Brothers for good. This was the same year that David Harris, her then-husband, was sentenced to a three-year prison term for draft evasion.

Baez also fell under the baleful eye of Mississippi’s Sovereign Commission, a secret agency operating behind a pro-segregationist public relations facade, as revealed in 132,000 pages of documents declassified in 1998. The Commission spied on and smeared civil rights activists by falsely linking them to communist organizations. Among the estimated 80,000 names contained in the files: Baez, Sidney Poitier, Washington attorney Vernon Jordan, James Brown, Harry Belafonte, and jazz musician Dave Brubeck. “It’s more disappointing than angering,” Jordon told CNN on March 17, 1998. “It’s disgraceful to have been spied on for doing your duty and trying to become first-class citizens.” But Horace Harned of Starkville, a former state legislator and two-term member of the commission, defended the CIA-backed group. “We were under the threat of being overrun by an alien force led by the communists. . . . This was a time when the Freedom Riders were marching and burning things from New Jersey to California. They threatened to march through Mississippi,” Harned declaimed. “Whether it was legal or not . . . never bothered me. We needed to have those spies. . . . A lot of [civil rights activists] were misguided, not realizing who was leading them and putting up the money.

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